


the way back home

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Series: Hope Carried Long (Cassian/Leia) [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: 30 Day OTP Challenge, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, BAMF Leia Organa, Canon typical feels, Cassian Andor-centric, Eventual Romance, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Leia Organa/Han Solo, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-15 21:09:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17536307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Five years after the battle of Endor, a spy and a senator meet in a forgotten hallway on Coruscant. She's not ready for a relationship and he's not ready for a life lived in peace. It turns out rebuilding hearts is just as much work as rebuilding a government.30 one-shot chapters, set chronologically through the "falling in love" bit of the Hope Carried Long series. This title stands alone and has no kidfic component.Updates every Friday!





	1. déjà vu

**Author's Note:**

> The titles come from the 30 Day OTP Challenge, Star Wars edition! Enjoy! Updates every Friday!

Once in a while, when Leia is very, very tired, she wonders if she imagined the whole rebellion. It's a ludicrous thought. She has the scars, both on her body and on her heart, to prove how hard-won the fight was, how real it had all been. But it’s been five years since Endor, and yet, here she is, back in a quiet corner of a reading room in the Coruscant Archives, preparing for yet another Senate vote.

Only now it’s the new Senate, the better Senate, the Senate that is, if she’s honest with herself, a chaotic mix of personalities that almost doesn't deserve to be called a functioning government at all. Everyone’s too hurt, too broken, too scared, to trust each other. It’s the opposite of her first days as a senator, a lifetime ago (because she’s only twenty-six, but she’s been in politics since she was fourteen). Then, there had been unity, among those who would someday rebel. All of them lived in fear of the possibility the Empire’s evils, rather than the surety of knowing just how terrible a power it would be.

The destruction of Alderaan changed all that.

And of course, it changed Leia. More than anyone else, perhaps. Now, she finds herself keeping company with holobooks and ghosts instead of trying to “have fun” on a weekend, like she’d been directed to by the other senators she’s friendly with.

 _ _Friendly__ , not __friends__. She’s not quite sure she remembers how to make friends these days.

She has Luke, of course. Though he’s far away right now, building a home for force-sensitive beings to become Jedi if they wish, or gain control of their powers, if they prefer. That latter option was strongly encouraged by Chirrut, who, along with Baze (of course) accompanied Luke on this quest.

As for Captain Rook, well, he ended up on the same planet as Luke, for reasons Leia suspects have less to do with the Force and more to do with the massive crush the pilot has been harboring on her brother for years now.

Leia has a few other friends spread throughout the galaxy. Wedge, Shara Bey, Winter, all the operatives she’s worked closely with, those who transfered from comrade to companion, to friend, but they’re all making their way in this new-found peace, too. They’re not the type of people she could send a holomessage to invite over for a friendly dinner. She’s not alone, she tells herself. Just lonely. There’s a difference. Alone is being trapped in a cell. Lonely is having no one to talk to, once work is done for the day.

Alone is a finality, and lonely is just temporary.

Amilyn will come back from her latest adventure, or Wedge will stop by on some fly-over to another planet, and they’ll catch up. She’ll whip up something in her apartment’s fancy kitchen, set her too-big table for company, and entertain them. Not that Leia really remembers how to host a dinner party. Some days, she’s not even sure she remembers what a genuine smile feels like. And every night, she forgets how to sleep soundly, if she remembers to try at all.

Which is why she’s in the archives, and not in her plush apartment. Thankfully, it’s not in the same building as where she used to live. Even __she__ couldn't handle that level of deja vu.

Or the ghostly memories that would pass by her every day. Memories of her father knocking on her door, checking in to make sure whatever new senatorial task she’s just been assigned isn’t too much for her. Memories of friends from Alderaan who dropped by for a visit. Friends who would still be able to drop by, if only they’d been visiting here, and not on Alderaan, when it had been destroyed.

Memories of the mother she’d never apologized to after their last fight. Breha had meant well. Leia knows that now. Had known that then. But she’d still argued, still pushed back, still slammed the door when Breha had dared to suggest that __Leia might settle down some day.__

And now? She’s reached some day, but there’s no settling. Not for Leia.

The memory leaves an unpleasant feeling on her skin, like her clothes are too tight, and she clicks the last holobook off. She’ll return to her research on the Droid Rights Charter of Kuat tomorrow. For now, she heads down to the cafeteria attached to this area of the archives. It’s a simple place where late-working organics could get a warm bowl of noodles or a cup of caf. Now that she’s donated most of her salary to various orphanages, refugee centers, and health clinics, Leia is more appreciative of a place that serves a hot meal for no more than two credit chips.

Also, whatever they’re serving, it always beats cooking.

* * *

 

She reaches the caf only to find the old durasteel doors closed. There's a sign tacked on, proclaiming the place closed for work until tomorrow morning.

Well, kriff.

She rubs her face, and spins around, heading back down the empty hallway. A ghost stops her in her tracks. Because it __has__ to be a ghost. To see such a familiar face, so far from mission briefing rooms on Echo Base… Even to consider those memories makes her shiver, as if the ice is falling down around her once more. But she pushes those feelings aside as Cassian Andor’s eyes find hers, recognition clearly dawning. Because he’s not a ghost, no more than Leia herself is one. He is alive, and he is here, on Coruscant, the one place she’d never thought he’d be.

The few years that have passed since they last saw each other have done nothing to dull the sharp-edged charm he’s had for as long as she’s known him. There’s always been a graceful poise to his movements, a softness in his voice and his gestures that betray none of the deadly efficiency he’s famous for. Now, though, there’s a veneer of exhaustion over him, more so than there even had been in the days leading up to the Battle of Endor.

It’s an odd feeling, to see someone more tired by peace than war. But odder yet is just how much she relates to it, how much more makeup she uses these days to look like the fresh-faced young leader that had been so natural to her only a few years ago.

“Caf’s closed.” She curses herself for such a simple, pointless thing to say. Of course he knows the caf is closed. And is that the best she can do? To greet an old friend, a battle-forged friend, a man who had dedicated his life, over and over again, to the Rebellion? Cassian Andor is a hero, and she treats him… Well, like the tired soldier in a battered uniform he appears to be

“So it is,” he says. Then, even softer, he adds. “It’s nice to see you, Senator Organa.”

There’s almost, __almost__ a smile on his face and it’s enough for her to offer a real one of her own in return. “And you…” but she pauses, studying the badge on his chest. “Captain?” it becomes a question in her confusion.

“Reassignment,” he explains. Which doesn’t help, not when she remembers placing the medal on his chest, the one that gave him a skip-level promotion, or even later, seeing his name and rank on the list of commanders the same level as her, right around Endor. It makes even less sense when he adds, “Captain Andor, again, here, after the end of all things.”

That is baffling to her, the idea that one would simply be demoted in the process of transferring into peacetime. But there are many military matters she’s no longer privy to, so she has to assume it’s for the best. At first, she’d assumed perhaps he was in one of his personas, spying on any number of the countless shady characters that now occupy, that have always occupied, the same political sphere as her. But no, he’d said Andor.

And thankfully, he hadn’t assumed she was Senator Solo, as a few others from the war had. “Are you hungry?” she asks.

“A little.” There’s a mircotell on his face that she doesn’t quite catch, some narrowing of his eyes or furrow of his brows. “If anything, sad to miss an opportunity to hear how you’re doing.”

“For that, you could just tune into any HoloNews network.”

“Who’s to say I don’t?” there’s an intensity in the way he’s holding her gaze that she never remembers from any mission brief they shared. No. Instead it reminds her of a dance floor, ages and ages ago, when he had been Willix and she had been a fool.

Now, Leia realizes, she’s still a fool, at least, a fool for forgetting the complicated feelings summoned by Cassian Andor appearing in her orbit.

He adds, “Good speech you gave, last week.”

Last week… that had been… Ah. On the same topic she’d been researching tonight. Droids’ rights. Coming from him, that compliment made more sense now.

“Cas-Captain Andor.” They weren’t comrades, not anymore. She had no right to his first name, or really, any of his time. But a simple question might save her hours of research… “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the mechanical uprising of Kuat Drive Yards, the one a few years ago that….” she trails off, because there is the smallest, smallest tell in his expression, the slight gleam in his eyes that she only recognizes from far too many hours studying him during boring briefings, watching the green-hued light of the mission boards play against the spark that sometimes appeared in his eyes.

Ah. That was quite an answer, indeed. Because if anyone had both the skills to slip into a core world undetected and the motive to aid in a droid uprising, it would be the man standing before her. “And how did you find Kuat, Captain?”

One eyebrow arches up, which means he must be surprised, at least a little, to have been caught. “Do you have the appropriate clearances to know? ”there’s now heat, completely unexpected, completely real, completely overwhelming in his soft voice. An offer, a suggestion, a hint, of things that make her cheeks flame.

“I do. I mean. I might. I…” her words melt, more than a little at the suggestion in that voice.His words have all the heat of a warm fire, of a kiss, of a great deal more than either of those things. It’s been a long time since Leia has felt anything but tired and cold. Now, her blush travels down, all the way to her collarbone.

“lf you need my intel, it’s yours.” Cassian folds his arms, tilts his head, and leans against the wall. “I’ll even write a mission report.”

Leia blinks. There. She must have imagined it. Surely Cassian Andor hadn’t just flirted with her. That would have been… completely unlike him. At least, unlike him in the way she’d known him, but she’d always been his commanding officer, or his princess, never his peer. Leia had never had peers, not until Luke and Han and Chewie elbowed their way into her life, and treated her as the equal to them she was. But thinking of Han enough to remind her that even if Cassian __had__ been flirting, it was generally better not to act on such a thing.

Relationships, Leia had decided, are for people who were much softer, much warmer, much more capable of love than she was. Hadn’t she said as much to Breha, in their last fight? In what she’d had no idea would be their last conversation? __I’m too much me to be loved. I’m not cut out for a relationship. Just let me go and do what I do best.__ The truth of her own words, spoken in anger then, but matched with reality over the last few years, only proved it. Leia is good at love in the abstract, as a concept that unites beings from across the galaxy, makes them stronger, helps them do the impossible. She is even, if her track record at being elected is considered, rather good at love on the macro level. She can love her planet, her people, her soldiers, her Rebellion. What she doesn't think she knows how to do is love someone, and be loved in return.

So, she returns Cassian’s casual tone, says, “Thanks. How about I make you dinner as payment.” There, it’s a transaction now. Something safe. Something she knows how to handle.

“Dinner it is,” Cassian agrees with a nod.

* * *

 

Twenty minutes later, Cassian is sitting on the edge of her couch, staring down into the mug she’d given him, since she hadn’t done dishes in a bit (or accepted the offer of a dish-washing-droid), and was a little… sparse on clean dishes. “You eat this. You… you really eat this?”

“I do,” she insists, holding up one long, limpid piece of… something with her spoon. Maybe a noodle? Had she put noodles in to the pot before she’d served it? Hopefully she had. “It’s from a recipe.”

“Is the recipe written for humanoids? Or Axzii’vai sea-snails?”

“Is that…” Leia sets down her own bowl. “Did you just make a joke?”

“Don’t get used to it.” He takes another spoonful, chewing slowly. There’s no expression on his face, but there’s never any expression on his face in a briefing room, which she feels her cooking has accidently turned this quiet moment between friends into. And that’s what they were, she decides in that moment. Friends. No longer comrades. Friends.

Cassian eats the meal silently, slowly, not complaining, but certainly not relishing it. Though, at moments, he lifts his head, watching her with something like the ghost of a smile. Maybe. The moments are never long enough to last, caught only the way she can catch a bit of an image of a speeder zipping by her window.

It’s actually strange, eating opposite someone, rather than staring out her window, food in hand. The apartment itself is quite lovely, far more vast than the one she’d had before. Its ‘fresher is spacious, with a pink Naboo-mined marble tub, a showerhead with forty-seven rotating options for water-spray, and a heated auto-self-dryer. Considering the sonic showers she’d gotten used to on various bases, she’d found the whole setup more than a little overwhelming. The opulence carried into the rest of the room with carpets layered on top of its already soft floor, with the furniture, all hand-carved from wood sourced on worlds decimated by war, the bed, more massive than the entire cockpit of an X-wing, and the fine kitchenette. The only thing in the whole room she truly loves is the couch, hand-made by Bodhi, upholstered from old pilots’ chaired headed to scrap yards, and laden with blankets from Alderaan that Shara Bey had found in an Outer-Rim world, then brought back for Leia. The couch is as comfortable as it is familiar, the sole bit of Rebellion-esque chaos in an otherwise carefully designed floor plan.

Which is why, of course, she’d surrendered it to Cassian.

He at least seems a little more comfortable here than he’d been in the hall, especially once she’d turned the window display down, switching it to a black panel. It has full holoprojecting capabilities, can show her a window view from many planets, even, the interior decorator had pointed out, one of the last holofeeds taken from one of the ski resorts on Alderaan. Leia had asked if the view included a nightly repeat of the Death Star’s laser turning the mountains to rubble. The interior decorator had sputtered, then quickly switched the window view back to the real time view of outside. Leia leaves it there most nights, though she is admittedly partial to the forests of Yavin IV, too.

When she finds a glob of something that seems entirely unedible, Leia finally says, “I might have been missing some of the ingredients.”

“How many?”

“Seven?” she shrugs. “And well, I substituted egg-powder, and i was a little short on Nau root so I cut that in half, and…”

“How many ingredients __were__ there?”

“Nine?” Even to her it sounds like a question.

His jaw clenches in a way she’s only ever seen in a mission briefing before. It makes her notice the stubble on his jawline. Her fingers tighten around her own bowl, as she tries not to think of stroking that sharp jaw, just to feel the warm skin and rough stubble.

Cassian stands up. He hadn’t taken his coat off, nor his boots. He’s not the type, Leia thinks, to stay long anywhere. “Right.”

“Leaving already?” a note of desperation she hadn’t meant to show crept into her voice.

“Only if you’re coming with me.”

For the second time that night, Leia is rendered speechless. Not by the strange deja vu of seeing an old friend, nor by the feeling of the past brushing over her skin like the chill of swift nightfall, but by the mischievous tone in Cassian’s voice.

This is a Cassian she doesn’t know at all.

 

It amazes her, though she scolds herself for being so shocked. Of course he’s more complex than the spy she’d known him as for song, the Fulcrum agent who had done the impossible every time the Rebellion had asked. Of course he has hopes, dreams, desires… that last word makes her cheeks heat. He’d asked her to come with him.

They’re both adults, both are sober, and equal, now, in ways they hadn’t been before. They could. She could go back with him, kiss him, feel the press of his warm body against hers, find comfort in each other for the night, then have an awkward breakfast before splitting ways. At least, she assumes that’s how those things go. Leia doesn’t have flings, not at all. Before Han, she’d had a few crushes. One boyfriend of no real merit, and two different girlfriends, both far more noteworthy, in accomplishments, kissing, and a great matter of other things, than the boyfriend had been.

After Han… there’s been no one. Just the fading of all the desires he awoke in her, the memories that melted into dreams that vanished now into the dark shadows of her mind. They’d had passion, the two of them, but that was all. It wasn’t enough to keep them together, when there was no longer the weight of the war bearing down on them both, making every moment of survival feel like a gift to be glorified, adored, shared with another. It’s his warmth she misses most, she realizes, his humor, his smile, and the feeling of falling asleep with her head pillowed on his warm chest, every beat of his heart reminding her they’d survived everything thus far.

And they’d kept surviving. Even parted on good terms. Leia wanted to be involved in politics. Han wanted… to go explore. Or see friends. Or take part in some new business venture Lando had just dreamed up. He wasn’t a man to stay in one place long, either. Every time she’d asked, Han’s answer was different, but Leia’s had always been the same.

She wanted to repair the galaxy.

Han wasn’t sure anything could fix it, and he was tired of trying.

He knew how to fight, and Leia’s sure that Han has lead more than one mission against some freshly uncovered cell of Imperials after his formal resignation of the role of General. But Han has no time for, and truth be told, no belief that paperwork, votes, and rule of law could ever undo all the evils dreamed up by every power-hungry monster who’d ever ruled the galaxy.

Chief among those monsters, Leia thinks, is the fallen Jedi who had fathered her.

“Le--Senator?” Cassian’s voice cuts into her thoughts. His hand is out. Hovering. Not touching her arm, not daring to. Just like he hadn’t dared to say her name.

Maybe she’d just imagined his flirtatious tone.

“Are you all right?”

“I.. I am. Forgive me, I get lost in thoughts sometimes.”

“I know the feeling.”

Of course. There are shadows in his eyes too, and so much pain in his past. When she’d been given his dossier, eternities ago, it had stated __Cassian Andor has grown up inside the Rebellion, and completed his first mission for us at nine years old. He is both capable and confident, and trusted with the most sensitive of our tasks.__

A trust he has never betrayed. A trust that gave them the plans for the Death Star, helped evacuate Hoth, aided in countless other tasks, all… for what? Why had Cassian dedicated his whole life, bloodied his hands and broken his body, just to remain a soldier after the war? Why wasn’t he with others, making a new home on Yavin IV?

Why didn’t he have a home?

Leia knows why __she__ didn’t, re-lived that moment far too often (even without the help of a damn window), but __he__ wasn’t from Alderaan. Fest, though damaged, is being rebuilt. He could go home. “What were you saying?”

“I was saying I’ll walk you to my place, for a better dinner.” His smile, she thinks, isn’t genuine, but it’s not cruel either. It’s the type of smile one offers when they want to, but they’re not quite sure they remember how to. “Just dinner,” he adds.

She lets out a breath. “Just dinner is perfect. I’m sorry mine was…”

“Yours was entertaining,” he replies, letting her open her door before following her out. “And an excellent icebreaker.”

“You never did tell me about Kuat.”

* * *

 

He fills her in, in whispered, coded sentences as they walk through winding corridors, heading away from the senatorial suite. She’s used to this sort of thing, knows that military intelligence during the war preferred to walk and talk, rather than sit in a potentially bugged room. The rebellion had no loss of life, (although severe loss of profits for the shareholders) and it’s nice hearing about a conflict, that, for once, built more than it destroyed. He only pauses once in his telling, as they step into an older elevator, heading many floors down. Cassian admits, “still don't like elevators,” which hints at a story she desperately wants to know.

That surprises her too, how much she wants to know about him. How much she likes listening to him. She’s so engrossed in his story, and not their walk, that she doesn’t notice how far down they are into the depths of the complex of Senatorial residential buildings until there’s a sudden chill in the air when the elevator doors swing open.

Leia shivers.

Cassian moves, and suddenly, a warm coat is draped over her shoulders. Leia looks up, but there’s absolutely no expression in his face, beyond his usual calm expression. Not even a twitch of a smile or a flicker of notice in his eyes.

She pulls the coat tighter around her shoulders, enjoying both the warmth and the weight of it. Military coats had a certain heaviness to them that she misses these days, when most of what she wears are made of silk and lace and lies.

“Almost there,” he says.

Leia looks around, realizing they’re in the barracks now. It makes sense, and yet, “you didn’t want an officer’s apartment.”

“They put me here,” he shrugs. “It’ll do.”

More questions hover in her mind. She wants to ask exactly what he’s doing for the new government, why he’s stationed on Coruscant, a thousand more things. But he’s not forthcoming with any of those details, so she decides to keep those questions to herself.

He leads her to a single door at the end of the hall, and punches in a code, then turns the panel to reveal a second keypad, adds another code, then scans his hand. Leia is quite sure no other room in this hall had those extra layers of security added.

The door swings open. He leans in to turn on the light, and Leia doesn’t miss the careful sweep of his gaze across the room, nor the way he presses a second switch which she’s sure disables other security measures. “Kaytu’s out for the night.”

He’d mentioned the droid a few times as they’d caught up in her apartment, but she hadn’t realized they lived together. It made sense though. She’d rarely ever seen Cassian without the security droid at his side. “Wild party?”

“Maybe,” he replies, with that almost-smile tugging at his lips again.

Leia takes in the room. That’s all it is. There’s not even a door for a ‘fresher unit, so that must be something shared with others on the floor. A cot rests in one corner, the exact same issue one as she’d gotten familiar with on bases herself, a set of shelves in another. There’s a few crates she recognizes as military ones, and knows there must be plenty of ammo, along with other items, in them. A few jackets hang on one wall, and there’s a stack of holobooks by the cot. The small kitchen is just a table with a single heating element, a refrigerated box, and a single drawer.

Cassian nods at the one chair. “Sit.”

She does, and holds back all her questions. Then, she notices the table is missing part of a leg, and is propped up with a bit of scrap metal. It, combined with his meager kitchen, with his standard-issue-canned foods, with the cot in the corner, is too much. “You were a __general,__ ” she finally blurts out.

Cassian only keeps looking down into the bowl he’s adding eggs to. The bowl has a chip on its rim, deep enough to notice from where she’s sitting, and she understands why he’d said nothing when she served him soup in a mug. “You could have… you were. You were head of military intelligence, after…” she stops herself from reminding them both of another loss. “I don’t understand.”

“No need for military intelligence in peacetime.”

“But surely, there’s other roles, other skills…”

Cassian finally looks up at her, and there is the shadow of every dark thing from the war in his eyes. Every task they’d asked him to complete, every battle he’d had to fight. “What skills?” he asks, and there is a hoarseness in his voice like the sound of an ocean drained dry.

“You’re brilliant. You can run data, or aid in translations or--”

“Assassinations?” there’s the ghost of a smirk on his face, but no warmth at all in his voice. “Let’s be honest, Organa. We both know exactly what skills of mine were honed, and they were,” he pauses to pour the mixture into the now-hot skillet. The food crackles loud in the silence, sizzling with far more heat than either of them have in their voices. “They were not the skills that will help me find work in peacetime.”

“You say that word like it’s a curse?”

“To a soldier who knows nothing else, maybe it is.”

He returns to cooking, and remains silent. The smells wafting from the pan carry a great deal of heat, of spices she can’t name, and a happiness she’s not sure she deserves. It’s been so long since she ate a meal with a friend.

As Cassian divides what appears to be a hearty stew between two mugs, he says, “i don’t mind this,” he says. “To be clear. It’s a good place. Safe. Comfortable. It’s my own, which is more than I can say about other assignments.”

“Didn’t you bunk with Luke a few times?”

That got a real smile from him. “Bodhi. Bodhi was my roommate. Skywalker was the… bonus roommate.”

Leia giggles. He sets the mug of stew down in front of her, and places a spoon beside it. “Do you see them?” he asks, leaning against the counter with his own mug.

“Luke and Bodhi? They visited once… I don’t think Coruscant is really either one’s favorite planet.” Leia takes a small spoonful of the soup, and tastes it. Almost instantly, she melts. The stew is warm, in more than just temperature. It’s the kind of heat that spreads like a comfortably blanket over her shoulders. A sigh escapes her, before she takes another sip.

“I think I’ll take that as a compliment to my cooking.”

“You should,” she replies. “This is excellent.”

“I’m sure you said the same thing to the Ewoks,” he teases. He… he teases? Is Cassian Andor teasing her?

“Only after I was assured no sentient beings went into their stew,” she retorts, but with a smile. She’s visited Endor more often than any other planet, lately. It’s nice sitting with Wickett and the others, letting Threepio translate, chattering about new cubs and fresh crops, ignoring all the galaxy’s politics outside the village.

‘It was excellent work you did there,” he said. “I was… I’d meant to tell you that.”

“You were on Endor?”

“With the pathfinders, yes.” He doesn't’ say if he was with Han’s pathfinders, and leia’s not sure she wants to ask. She’s spared asking, by him adding, “that night, by the fire…”

Then, he stops.

“What is it?”

Cassian takes a long sip of his soup, which means Leia can’t tell if the redness that appears on his cheeks is from the heat of the soup or… whatever he was going to say. “It’s…” he tries again. “You looked happy, there.”

Out of all the things he might have said, that one is not one she expected. “I was,” she says. Before she knew Darth Vader had fathered her. Before the complicated work of nation-building began. Before she and Han fell apart, like ice melting in the spring. She finishes her stew. Soflty, she admits, “Sometimes, I think there’s another Leia, out there, somewhere, far from here, and she is happy.”

Instead of offering pity or too-quick sympathy, like all the others do, Cassian just nods. “I wonder, sometimes, if I’ve left parts of myself behind, each time I’ve… each moment that…” he swallows. She can hear the words he’s reaching for, the ones he can’t find it inside himself to admit to. The man who was brave enough to help steal the Death Star plans can’t say the words __I’ve been happy.__ “And maybe those ghosts linger in those moments, forever.”

It’s an all too real feeling for her, as well. The laughter, the genuine smiles, never come as easily as they did before. Her former joy haunts her, along with all her pain. “You’ll have those moments again, Cassian,” she says. “I know it.”

His eyes meet hers. “Who am I to contradict a senator?”

“Leia,” she says. “I’m just Leia to you.”

“You,” he replies, stepping over to pick up her mug and place it in a small basin of water, “are never __just__ anything. But, tell me, is Endor where you’d go? If you wanted to find your happiness?”

“Maybe?” she replies. Because what other answer is there, that doesn’t involve time travel or other impossible things? Because she’d even been happy on Coruscant, sometimes, even during the dark times. Because her father would stop by her apartment, bringing her a dish of food from home, or simply to sit with her and drink tea, talking over any matters crossing her mind, from trade route negotiations to her crushes on various friends. “And you? Where would you be, if you were happy?”

His back is to her, and perhaps it’s a small mercy that she cannot see his face, based on the way his body freezes. She thinks, perhaps, he won’t answer, but finally he does. His voice is thick with emotion, his words a rumble of loss and memory and hope. “On a U-wing, on the way back to base. On the way back home.”

Cassian didn’t name a base. That, in itself, was enough of an answer. He’d been in the fight his whole life. And now the fight was over, at least, according to the HoloNews, and he had no home.

There’s only the drip of the water from the basin, the soft hiss of the shoddy electrical heat in the room. The silence stretches all the way into the past, summoning the ghosts of all they both lost. Leia stands, suddenly. Approaches, and then, only a foot from him, offers, “may I... “ her hand floats above his shoulder, not wishing to presume.

His answer is to turn, wordlessly, and lean into Leia’s open arm. Her body reacts, pulling him closer, holding him tightly. His breath is hot against her neck as he takes one steadying breath, and then another. Leia holds him a little tighter. She can’t give him back the war that he misses, can’t remove her signature from the peace treaties, but she can give him this, this small moment, this warmth.

Finally, he steps back. His hands cup her face. For one moment, Leia wonders if they’ll kiss. What she’ll do if they kiss. What would happen after a kiss? After the next day? It’s too much to even consider, and her heart races. Fear, not of the unknown, but the known, seeps into her bones. Because she knows she cares, and caring always leads to pain.

 _ _I like nice men__ , she’d said. She should have said, __I like believing men are nice.__

* * *

 

Then, Cassian moves, just slightly. Not to claim her lips, not to let his hands skim down to her hips, not to tug her into a more intense embrace. No. All he does is kiss the top of her head, and to hold her softly, like she’s the one only a moment away from shattering. “It’s late,” he says.

“It is,” she agrees, shaky now. Because this has gone wildly off script. They’re supposed to kiss with more and more fire, to shed clothes, not to bare their hearts. They’re supposed to stumble into bed and do a thousand things that will bring a moment’s pleasure. To chase passion, not honesty.

“I’ll walk you back.”

“That would be…” She stumbles, finds the word, finds she means it. “Nice.”

She can see just the hint of a smile if she turns her head just right. It’s a moment that she’ll treasure forever. A moment that lingers as they walk back together, this time, not talking, not really, beyond offering small, short stories, of faces and places long gone from most other’s minds. Finally, Leia says, “I’d like to try and cook dinner again, sometime.”

“Maybe that should be a team effort,” he replies.

Team. A good word. She can do teamwork, even if she can’t handle a relationship. Really, maybe neither of them can. “That would make me happy.”

“Then we’ll do so.”

His comm beeps, and he curses softly. “I have to take this. Can you… do you know the way home from here?”

She nods. Doesn’t bother to tell him her apartment isn’t home, because he must know that already. Neither of them can use the word home the way other people do. The way she used to. Home is just a bed, just a place to dream of the real home long gone. Her home, she thinks, is the same one occupied by all ghosts, a place between waking and sleep, a place between now and the past. A place only another ghost can see.

Leia’s taken two steps down the long hall when she pauses, realizes she’s too comfortable for this cool night. “Your jacket…” She begins, though she doesn’t move to take it off. Loves how it envelops her, hides her, keeps her safe. Clothes, she thinks now, as she hadn’t when she was younger, should be armor, not art. What good is being beautiful when beautiful things are broken just as easily as not?

“Keep it, I’ll see you again.”

He nods at her, just once, but he smiles, and that, coupled with the promise and the comfortable weight of the warm jacket on her shoulders is the most at home Leia has spent in years.

Then he disappears down the long hall in the opposite way of her own path. Whatever work he’s doing for the government, whatever missions they’ve assigned him, they certainly do nothing to lessen the weight on his shoulders. If anything, he seems to disappear as he walks away, first fading into a man she no longer recognizes, a man with faster, more sure steps and yet less grace in his movements, his stride larger, faster, and then, sliding entirely into the shadows, as if he was never there at all. Leia is left alone. Alone, but warm in his jacket, warm with pleasant memories and hopes for the future.

Alone, but at home.


	2. Reassuring each other

**Reassuring each other**

Draven told him, years and years ago, not to count his missions. To let each one fall out of memory, like a wiped data disk. But Draven is dead, and somehow, Cassian took his place as head of Military Intelligence. He keeps that position through the end of the war. Most of his work, he does the way Draven would, the way he’d been trained to. He keeps two sets of mission reports, the official and the unofficial. He trusts no one, not entirely, not even himself. Well, he trusts K-2S0, but that’s a different sort of trust. Cassian knows the droid would put Cassian’s needs above the Rebellion’s, a fact which terrifies him, but comforts him, sometimes, on the coldest nights.

In almost all things, Cassian operates as if Draven is standing beside him, watching over his shoulder. But, he _does_ count every mission. Not just the ones he takes himself (because there are some tasks he refuses to give others), but also the ones he sends the greenest soldiers out on, the ones where no one comes back, the ones he knows he asks too much on, and the ones… the ones that Jyn refuses. Those, more than any other, matter. Which is, in it’s own way, a problem. But it’s not one he knows a solution to.

Because Jyn, like Kay, puts many things, like those she loves, above the mission. Unlike Kay, though, Jyn fails to communicate exactly when and why she’s done such a thing. It puts a strain – more than a strain, a _wound_ – into the thing neither one is ready to call a relationship. The conflict echoes in every minor argument that flares between them, ones that, unlike the first ones, aren’t easily solved with kisses and soft whispers of love. The war that brought them together is tearing them apart too.

When it finally ends, not with an argument, for once, but with a gentle discussion, with no tears, with a warm embrace and a promise to stay in touch, Cassian feels as if the last bit of his heart leaves with her. So with no heart, he surrenders to his work. There’s always more to be done, even as the war winds down. More splinter cells to find, more Imperials to hunt down, more coded messages to break.

He keeps working, working as his own department is disbanded after the war, working despite K-2S0’s comments on his fragile health, working until there’s no work left, working until Jyn doesn’t even bother to try to comm him anymore, and then working until the only thing left to do is accept the job the New Republic offers him. And that day, Cassian moves from being head of Military Intelligence into becoming the New Republic’s first hitman.

Not as if they’d call it that, of course.

Not that they’d even call him Cassian. He goes by Operative Valor these days, a hero’s name for a man who’s done nothing to deserve it.

They give him an apartment on Coruscant, which he doesn’t mind because it has a nice charging station for K-2S0, and good locks, and no windows. It’s a life, he tells K-2SO. It’s a life, and it’s a reason to be alive. Because he’s needed. K-2SO asks him what _he_ needs, though, and that’s a question he can’t answer. It turns out new governments, much like old rebellions, still have prices to be paid in blood.

It’s a question he starts thinking about again after that night that he’d met Leia.

Leia, who must have known who he was, at least since Scarif, if not before. But if she had known of him, it would have just been as a soldier, a captain, and than, as much as he hates the word, a _hero_. After that, yes, he held positions of command, but never at the same table as her. Their skills were too different, and too closely aligned. The public face of the rebellion had no need to know what occured in the shadows, and the shadows did their best work out of sight of the light. He’d seen her that night the Rebels danced and sang on Endor, that night it seemed the war was over and things would be simple again. He’d watched her dance, and he’d thought for a moment that her smile was the most lovely thing, more lovely than the word _peace_ , than the sky free of any Death Star.

But he’d never told her. He was just a shadow, after all.

So, maybe, just maybe, Leia Organa hadn’t really known who he was, during the war. Why else would she have been so kind to him? No one would have invited a spy and an assassin into their apartment so easily, not even if that spy had been on their side.

And that kindness had softened him, kick-started something inside that felt a bit like warmth, even if it wasn’t from his heart. (Nno, that’s long gone. Even Kay can’t summon any warm feelings of compassion and care from Cassian, beyond a vague sort of comfort that the droid hasn’t left his side, despite all his attempts to push him away. Their bond had been tested, after the uprising in Kuat, and Cassian knows he’s the one who failed them.)

Leia had made him feel warmer that night. More incredible was that she’d made him feel at all, that he’d held her and wanted so much more than he would ever ask for, that he’d held her and pretended he was a man who could be wanted by someone.

Then, the moment passed, and he’d walked her halfway back home. Made a promise to call on her again, a promise he gave the way only an operative could give, made entirely of truthfulness and yet completely wrapped in a lie. Because Cassian _wanted_ to be the type of man who could be a friend to a Senator, but he knew that the work Operative Valor does would never allow such a friendship to exist.

So he hides from her, ignores the knock at his door that must be her, avoids passing by her in the caf. No one’s quite as good at hiding, from emotions or from people, as a spy.

His plan works for a long time, for weeks that pass by like neverending days, punctuated only by the shuffle of feet from cot to ‘fresher to work and back again. K-2S0 talks _at_ him, not _to_ him, because he doesn’t often respond, not while his sniper rifle is slung over his back and his hands are bloody again, and this time, the target hadn’t been wearing the grey uniform of an Imperial. He tells Kay to leave him alone, to go find other things to do. Kay sometimes does that, and other times stands guard at his bedside, keeping him safe from the terrors of the night, as much as anyone can.

Then, one day, all of Cassian’s carefully planned avoidance goes awry. Because his mission comes first, before all plans to avoid, before all plans to never see Leia again. Ironic, since the first time he’d met her, lifetimes ago, had been on a mission as well. Though he doesn’t think of that mission, not now, not ever.

Truth be told, even if he counts his missions, the only time he thinks of most of them is in the moment between waking and sleeping, when fear of the next dawn overtakes him.

* * *

 

Today, Cassian is perched high above a meeting room in some half-forgotten penthouse building on Coruscant. The room had been chosen by the New Republic’s leaders for its location; not for the skyline, nor even the prestige of being a top-floor-room. No, it had been picked for the very narrow, nearly invisible wrap-around walkway, only accessible from one ladder tucked away in the hall. It must have once been used by servants to hang decorations, or to throw glitter down onto the dance floor. Now, it’s a place for him and his sniper rifle to watch the meeting below.

Waiting for the former Moff to do anything that might destroy what weeks of peace talks have built. And if he does, if he dares to draw the pistol Cassian knows he’s carrying, the Moff will be dead before his greedy finger ever squeezes the trigger.

Diplomacy, written in blood.

Leia Organa is leading the peace side of the talks. Through his scope, he watches her frustration build with the exchange. She hides it well, though, her only tells a raised eyebrow or a pointed look away. Unlike many he knew in the war, he thinks, she’s only grown more beautiful in the years since Endor. There’s a calm grace to all of her movements, even if there’s a tiredness behind her eyes. Power suits her well.

Maybe all heroes are tired these days.

Maybe no one deserves to be stuck with such a heavy title when they were all so young. He’s… he’s what, thirty-one now? Thirty? He’s lost track of his own age, having lied about it so often.

The former moff (Cassian’s been told his name but refuses to give the marks names, another lesson from Draven) gets up. Cassian listens closer, hears that the meeting is being adjourned for dinner. There’s a keypad on Cassian’s leg, one that his free hand can reach down to tap out that message to the other operatives. He waits until it buzzes twice, an affirmation that there will be eyes on the mark as soon as he leaves the room, before he lifts his head from the sight.

He rolls his shoulders, and takes a moment to blink, another to take a deep breath. There’s more movement below, as Leia walks away too. Her skirts swish around her in a way that reminds him of snow billowing in a windstorm. Once she leaves, he watches the remaining occupants with far more detached interest. His thoughts are elsewhere.

Which is why, for once, someone can sneak up on him.

“Cassian?” It’s Leia’s voice.

It sinks into him, prickles his skin with shame, makes his breath die in his throat. He turns, but knows he won’t bother to explain. There’s nothing to be said, when one is caught with a sniper rifle trained on the scene below.

“Cassian,” she says again.

Finally, he turns around to meet her eyes. He’s not sure what to expect, if it will be pity or rage in her expression.

He finds neither. Instead, Leia just regards him calmly, the same way she’d looked at him over the mugs of her terribly cooked dinner.

“I,” he begins.

Leia moves one hand to the folds of her voluminous dress, and withdraws a small, smooth-edged holdout blaster. “Old habits die hard, don’t they.”

He takes in the gun, the practiced way she holds it, the way her whole outfit was crafted around concealing it from even his trained eye, and understands. “You were prepared…”

“To do the same as you.” 

There’s nothing else he can say to that, no way to explain himself, not now. He finds he can’t even look in Leia’s eyes, his gaze drifting away, back down to the view beneath them. “You should get back to your meeting.”

“It can wait.”

Her tone makes even the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. It’s the voice of the Commander who supervised the Echo Base evacuation, who provided the lead support on countless mission briefings. If the Leia who had cooked him a terrible dinner had been sunlight, this Leia was blaster fire. “As you wish.”

“Don’t.” Leia shakes her head. “That’s not… I want you to be who you were. The last time we talked.”

 

Who he was? When is he ever sure who he is? He’s been so many identities, so many names, taken so many roles for so many missions, there is nothing left true within his bones. After the uprising on Kuat, he’s even found it hard to be the Cassian who is K-2S0’s best friend, has pushed even the ever-constant presence of the droid away.

Because the Rebellion had become the Republic, and in doing so, have sacrificed the word freedom. He’d been sent to quell the uprising, to talk the droids into surrendering to their work. He’d failed. Failed the way he had on Eadu, in a way that was heroic to so many and a failure to only him. Because he’d gotten hurt, and Kay had done the work, and when he woke, the droids had written a charter of rights.

A charter that this New Republic still hasn’t signed.

So who could he be to Leia, when he can’t be anything to Kay, and they’ve known each other for Kay’s entire life? Draven, too, had told him not to promise anything. Not to form attachments. Not to use the word friend, only comrade.

Comrades didn’t kiss foreheads and offer their coats, though. But Cassian has been a spy far more often than a soldier. It means that more often than anything else, Cassian is simply filling a role. He knows how to be someone else better than he knows how to be him. Being Cassian is hard. Being Joreth, Aach, the countless other names he’s worn, pulled around him like a blanket on a cold night, being those roles is easier. Cassian thinks back to his interactions with Leia that night. Shavit. Had he… he’d definitely flirted with her at first, trying for what was the easiest role to be to someone else. No one asked questions of a one night stand. No one tried to fix someone who only was in their bed for a few hours.

But Leia doesn’t look in the mood for a lazy smile and a wink right now, and really, he doesn’t think he can summon them up anyway. Not when he’s loaded down with weapons, not when he’s on alert as a sniper. Not without a few drinks coursing through his system.

Kriff. He really is a mess. He thinks back to the datachip he’d been handed, the day Military Intelligence folded. It contained access to holomeetings with some sort of health care professional, with guided exercises (he’d listened to only half of the first one, before stopping. He already knew how to breathe. He already knew how to survive. He didn’t need any help with either thing), and a prescription for a support droid.

_He’d retorted he had Kay._

_The medic had stared at him, repeated back Kay’s serial number, his model, his classification with increasing confusion, “That is your support droid?” she’d asked. “A KX Security droid.”_

_“He’s been reprogrammed.”_

_“To do what?”_

_Cassian had shrugged. “Whatever he wants.”_

There’s a soft touch on his arm in this present moment and he jerks back. Curses under his breath when he realizes it's just Leia. When he sees that now there’s pain in her face. She probably thinks he’s broken, dangerous, unstable. Maybe he is. He should apologize. Get back to work. He should--

“I’m sorry,” Leia says. “I didn’t ask. You just… your face went so blank, I…”

“I’m fine,” he adds, and then softer, “Thank you.” For her apology, and for reaching out. He’s not used to either. The other soldiers either see him as a legend or a ghost. Both of which merit only wide eyes and whispers from them, never an invitation to dinner or a warm hand on his shoulder. He’s no longer a spy, yet, he’s the most invisible he’s ever been.

“Cassian,” Leia says again. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

Leia smiles. “May I?” her hand hovers, close to reaching out again.

He nods once. Expecting a friendly pat on his shoulder. Instead, she darts closer, and kisses his cheek, her lips brushing over his stubble. “For keeping me safe.”

Cassian is rendered absolutely speechless by the kiss, and more so by her words. Both are so gentle, so much more than he deserves. “I…”

“I feel quite safe knowing you’re up here.” She says, turning to head back down the ladder with a smile that might just be to reassure him, or might be a genuine one.  “And don’t forget, I still have your coat.”

He realizes now that her light tone is as much of a facade as his flirting one had been. Because she’s kept the pistol in her sleeve, and only now does he see the glint of tiny knives, hidden mostly in the dark spiral bun of her hair. Leia Organa, he realizes, is not someone who will be caught unarmed ever again.

* * *

 

There’s a knock at Cassian’s door the next day. It’s an officer, one he doesn’t know. Or so they state, their voice coming through the durasteel more than a little muffled. Maybe it's his own head that's muffled, aching with a headache he knows he deserves.

“Kay?” Cassian asks from the cot, where he passed out only an hour ago. Sleep hadn’t come easily that night. Or that morning either, and he’d found himself with one too many glasses of something, again. The bar in the corner… no. It’s not a bar, it’s just a crate full of all the bottles of alcohol well-meaning people had given him over the years… has been his one source of rest, as much as it has been one of painful oblivion too. Cassian tries again, “Kaytu?”

Kay’s optics blink on. “Yes?”

“Run a security check on whoever’s at the door?” It’s a request, but Cassian is worried it sounds too much like a command. “If you’d like.”

“I don’t _like_ things, Cassian,” K-2SO contradicts. “I _do_ things.”

“Kay,” he sighs. He's not used to this friction between them. “I’m sorry.”

Kay steps toward him, rests a heavy metal hand on him. It’s a comfortable weight, coupled with Kay’s command. “Sleep.”

“I…”

“You require rest. I will handle the visitor.”

Cassian tries to protest, but the lingering amounts of whisky or brandy or whatever had been in that bottle last night pull at him, beckoning him back to sleep.

When he wakes, it’s to a chrono blinking that it’s much, much later in the day than it should be. He curses, tries to remember the last time he slept through work. He combs fingers through his messy hair, puts his feet on the floor, desperate to get dressed and get moving.

“You have nothing on your calendar today,” Kay states.

“Of course I do.” It is a work day. He’d have to go apologize to the Colonel in charge of his assignments. Apologize, too, to whoever they yanked off a leave day to take his spot. Because someone had to be monitoring that room. Someone had to keep their finger on the trigger.

And Cassian knows it was best if it was him. His hands would never be clean, so more blood on them made little difference. Some of the newest recruits had never seen combat, never killed. He couldn’t let their first death be one aimed through a scope.

Draven had also told him that. The day he’d found Cassian at the range, practicing with a sniper rifle almost as big as him, Draven had stopped him. “When you’re older,” the man said. Cassian had been all of thirteen (at least, officially. He knows he lied that day the Rebels found him, rounded his age up to something that had sounded old as a boy, but he can’t remember the age he was before the lie) and desperate to help. He’d demanded an answer, but Draven had said, “It’s a different thing, Cassian, when you can see a man’s last breath leave him. When you are the only thing between his life and his death.” It was one of the only times Cassian can ever remember the man expressing anything that might be called regret, or even emotion. Those words have lingered for lifetimes in Cassian’s heart, until perhaps, they are the only thing left in it.

 

“Cassian,” Kay uses the voice that’s lower in modulation, as close to a whisper as his motors allow. “You have been reassigned.”

“I’ve what? No. No, I have a job to do. I have to go, have to…” he’s racing around the room now, grabbing coat, shirt, belt, holster, all the pieces of him he’s worn every day he’s been himself. Because Cassian Andor is a rebel soldier. Cassian Andor has to be, has to exist so that he can keep the battle going, keep the rebellion alive. Cassian Andor is real.

Cassian Andor is as real as the threat he’s fighting.

“It is a good reassignment,” Kay says, handing Cassian the boot he couldn’t find. “If you will stop moving, I will provide details.”

“I don’t WANT details.” He’s over at his small table now, his fingers clumsy as they try to reassemble the rifle he’d left in pieces after cleaning last night. But despite all his years of rebuilding it, today, his fingers shake, and the scope falls from his hand.

There’s the unmistakable sound of glass shattering a second later.

It’s enough to stop his racing thought. He takes one breath. Another. Was this what that stupid datachip had wanted him to learn? How to breath through the moments when the fires inside choked his lungs? They’d said to count to eight. That’s too long. Too many seconds.

A life can be taken in fewer than eight seconds.

“Cassian, you do not need that. Not today.” Kay’s hand is on his wrist, pushing the blaster down. Then, the hand stays, and this time, Cassian turns toward the droid. Kay looms in his vision, his familiar dark chassis all he can see. Cassian caves, leans against him. It’s a strange thing, to feel warmer next to a being made entirely of imperial-issued metal, but Kay is his closest friend, his oldest, his….the best thing that’s ever happened to him, if he’s honest.

Because Kay has known him as Cassian, and known him as Joreth, and Willix and all the other names that fly through his memory like the last sparks of a dying fire.

“Reassigned?” he finally asks.

“To Senator Organa’s personal guard. Chief of it, in fact.”

He lets out a soft exhale. “Le- the senator doesn’t have a guard.”

“Then you are her guard now.”

Cassian scrubs his face. His fingertips brush over a beard that is, he realizes with a shock, much longer than he usually allows it. How long has it been since he trimmed it? Since he shaved his jaw? “I was given orders to guard her?”

“Yes.”

Orders are orders. Unquestionable, final, firm. (Except for that one time, in the rain, in the darkness, when…) It’s why he asked to be demoted, why he is happy to be a Captain again. Because he knows far better how to take orders than how to live a life without them.

“Let’s go then.” Cassian says.

“I will not be going.”

“What?”

“I have never had orders for this new army, Cassian.”

“It’s not an army, it’s a security force.” The New Republic had made that clear, even if their ranks are filled with veterans, their weapons almost all the assorted blasters acquired by rebel forces over the years. Only the uniform is new, consistent, and made of wool far too reminiscent of the grey uniform he’d once wore as Joreth, the uniform he’d only worn to help destroy the military that created it.

“That’s what my original programming script called it too,” K-2S0 says. “Not a battle droid, a Security droid. That is the first line in the marketing material for a KX unit. Do you know that, Cassian?”

“I…” Of course he did know that. Somewhere, deep in his mind, in a place that his current state of exhaustion can’t access easily. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s your choice.”

“Correct. And I choose to continue my current employment.”

“Your _Employment?”_ How much more than just a few times shaving has he missed? Since when did Kay have a job? Since when did...

“I have been hired for my own skill at security. I am paid standard market rate for a bodyguard and I am given _two_ blasters.”

“Blasters are banned for civilians on Coruscant.” Images flash in Cassian’s mind of Kay being arrested, shut down, reprogrammed. What had he been thinking?

“I am not a civilian. I am a droid.”

“Fine, fine.” He snaps, but doesn’t stop leaning on Kay. Trying hard to readjust to all this new information. A new job. Kay, employed elsewhere. “Who is your employer.”

“He’s a gambler. A sabacc player.”

“Gambling has also been banned.”

“So has killing people.” K-2S0 says.

“Can you quit?” Cassian asks. “Stay here. You’ll be safer.”

“You are right,” Kay says. “I am sure no one will be able to find a KX unit who lives in the senate apartments.

“You told him where you live?”

“Of course.”

Cassian scrubs his face again. “What do my orders say, exactly?”

“To report to Senator Organa tomorrow. You’ve been given today off. I suggest you take a shower.” K-2S0 says. “Your mental processing is always better after you shower, especially when there are traces of alcohol still on your breath.”

“You noticed?”

“You are important to me, Cassian. I have an entire data set on your health metrics, and they have never been worse.”

He’s not sure what it says about him that life in peacetime is impacting his health more than life in a war zone had. But he takes the advice anyway, just like he’ll take the orders tomorrow. If they came from an officer, he’ll follow them. It’s what he’s good at. What he’s always done. There had been other commanding officers in his life, beside Draven. Of course. Plenty of them, and plenty more had relayed messages to him, because a spy was always the most important when he was on mission, not when he was on base. Not when he was home.

He misses when a base felt like home.

* * *

 

After his shower, Kay is nowhere to be seen, so Cassian heads out for a walk. He leaves the Senatorial complex without notice, not even from the guards. They either assume he’s a ghost or just another civilian leaving for the day. Hands in pockets, Cassian keeps walking. He heads lower, as he always does on Coruscant. Lower is simpler. Easier. More familiar to him. He follows a mid-line floating walkway, then, decides to drop even lower, scaling down the side of one building, and then another. The nice thing about Coruscant, about any city really, is that everyone is weird enough, busy enough, used to enough strange sights, no never question another.

It’s that anonymity that lets him journey all the way to an abandoned old plaza, lower in the city than he’d been in years. Here, dust and rodents and bugs are seen more often than glittering citizens, and the hover cars that zip past carry heavy pollution in both chemicals and sounds.

The sizzle of Elbina peppers pulls him away from his thought. One of the most picant for humanoids, Elbinas carry a tang more like blaster-fire than anything edible. Cassian, admittedly, has grown fond of that taste, because Elbinas, being considered a weed and a waste by most humanoids, are quite cheap, and always had been easy for him to find. They’re nothing like the complex, hot-sweet or warmly-bitter types of pepper he remembers from further back in his past, but they still bring the smallest bit of a smile to his face.

And make his stomach rumble.

He keeps following to a small cart in the very edge of the plaza, tucked agains a wall, powered by cords that are most certainly running up the inside of the building, draining the power from a more wealthy section. Coruscant, he thinks, is good for that too. The rich are so rich here that theft-to-survive is so much easier.

“Hello,” he greets the woman who is bent over the hot eltco-griddle, chopping the peppers into smaller pieces, near the sizzling meat. It’s a style he recognizes as Hoskoian, which makes him pivot, falling into another language, bowing his head and extending one hand flat. “H’chu apendkee.”

Without looking up, she mutters “Achuta.”

It’s a greeting, nonetheless. And she is quite busy, her hands flying over the various tasks to cook the meal, turning the flatbread, pushing the meat to cook evenly, and then, fidgeting with a knob that must control the heating array beneath the griddle. Her hands are wrinkled, bony, bearing as many scars as there are signs of her advanced age.

“It smells wonderful, grandmother.” he asks, because in most regions that speak huttese, that is always a compliment. Because family, found, blood, battle-forged, is valued the most by people who have lost theirs.

That makes her look up with a grateful smile. She asks, “you cook?”

“I try to.” Cassian pauses, “how much do you sell the food for?”

“I do not sell.”

“Pardon?” he keeps his manners soft and gentle.To speak Huttese to another person is to speak the language they suffered under, the language of the masters who had marked her hand as a sign of her as property. It is the least Cassian can do, he thinks, to offer her respect in her native tongue.

“I make food for all who need it. I… I want to help.”

A lifetime ago, he would have known what to do. Would have whispered to her of the Rebellion, would have given her his recruiter speech. Now, he has no hope to offer her. What is he supposed to tell people now that the war is over? What can he promise when the new dawn has come and the old pain still remains?

Now, he has nothing to offer her, this woman who is doing more with her time to help those the Rebellion has left behind than anything Cassian has done in years. What good is it to be a war hero if he turns his back on those in need in times of peace? But what can he offer? He knows that he can get the meager credits he’d tossed into a pocket into her own purse without her noticing, but he wants to, he needs to offer more.

All he has, in the end, is all he’s ever had. Himself. “I’d like to help you then.”

She looks him up and down, as calculating as any general on a battlefield, before nodding curtly. “You’ll do. Tend to my peppers.”

It’s a good task to try out a stranger on, a way to see if he means his words. The smoke carries a good deal of the fiery flavor of the peppers, making his eyes sting. But the work is similar to the way he’d learned to cook, more than one lifetime ago, and he falls into an easy rhythm. Soon, people arrive in front of the little cart.

He hadn’t thought to ask how long the woman had been at this task, but clearly, she is well known. Beings of various species soon queue up. Some bring plates, others, more supplies for the griddle. A second heating element is set up and a very large Wookie begins to work on a stew, adding in vegetables as she’s handed them.

Cassian is soon directed to go peel some buyyi root for the stew, which he does, that same smile coming back again. Because it’s been ages since he’s gotten to cook with others like this, even longer since he’d been bossed around a kitchen. And so, so, long since helping other was a simple thing, free of guilt or fear.

The time passes. For once, it’s not Draven’s presence looming over Cassian’s shoulder, but more distant memories, one that if he thinks too hard about their names, tears would come to their eyes. So he doesn’t think, just lets himself work, catching in his mind a flash of memory of warm hands and soft brown eyes, whispered words of love from so many family members, all gathered in the kitchen to cook together. Draven and the others had taught Cassian almost everything he knows. Almost, but not all. He came to his first base already a skilled cook, already eager to help in the kitchen.

Cassian spends the next three hours helping the woman make meals for all who come to her table. Faces blur, words of thanks cascading in every language. He sees hunger in many’s eyes, but he also sees hope. The first cook, Miiaii, as she’d introduced herself as, isn’t the only freed slave. And there are so many inter-species couples, and more than one small child a clear melding of disparate parents. All of those, Cassian thinks, were offenses punishable by death under the Empire.

A small child with Kiffar marks and the tails of a Twi’lek offers to help him peel the next root, ad he shows her how to, the two of them speaking in Huttese at first, and then basic. Her three parents watch from nearby, each one laden down with more food they’ve brought. One of the three, the Twi’lek tells him, “we used to come here, last year, for food. Now, with work, we can come to bring food.”

This, he realizes too, is hope. The hope for a better tomorrow, a warmer one, a more loving one. It’s not the hope he used to be able to offer, when the only way to win was to fight. Now, he sees, there are so many ways to draw closer to hope, to that better future.

* * *

 

When Cassian finally leaves, it’s with a soft agreement (not a promise, he knows better than to make those) that he will come again. It’s not quite night by the time he makes his way into the Senatorial complex. He thinks, maybe, he should visit Leia. Talk to her, before this new role starts. Talk to her, perhaps, while there is still hope in his heart and he hasn’t spent another night in fear of the past.

And, he thinks, a ghost of that smile on his lips, maybe he should cook dinner for her again.

Her hallways is empty, though it is not quiet. Voices echo as he approaches, which makes the joy slide from him like a cloak slipping off his shoulder. His footsteps turn silent, his posture more alert. He listens outside the door. Amazed there’s no guards stationed, not at the door, not in a nearby alcove. A sign of peace , he tries to tell himself. A sign that trust now spreads throughout the galaxy. But still, he listens in, and while he does so, his hand goes to rest on the butt of his blaster.

“Some of these names should be tried for war crimes, not given _honors!_ ” The first person to speak snaps, leaning into every bit of sharpness offered by their core-centic polished accent.

“The Alliance to Restore the--”

“Oh, don’t give me that. They were Rebels.”

“Some of whom are in this very room with you now,” Major--no--Senator Mu’gu’ge says, every word a gurgle from their second throat, and yet, every word matching the beat of Cassian’s heart. Furious, indigent, and just a little horrified.

They’d _liberated_ Coruscant. They’d wiped out the Empire. They’d saved the galaxy.

He’d helped. Or so he tries to tell himself at night. Tries to tell himself he’d made the right choices, done the right things. Even though, he knows his own file has been scrubbed clean. Cassian J. Andor, according to the official database, was little more than a datapad-jockey, a glorified accountant. He had a little combat experience, as almost every Rebel did, but never enough to draw any attention toward him. No mention of his missions, not even of Operation Fracture, no matter how important it had been in the end.

 _I wiped it for you, Cassian._ Draven had said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. It must have been maybe halfway through the war? He couldn’t remember. He’d been in the fight, if not the war, for so long. _Nothing on your file that’ll draw any attention. You’ll be free to make you way in the universe after this. Free to do whatever you want, without some old commanding officer breathing down your neck._

As if he has any idea how to make his way in a universe without a commanding officer. Without orders. Without a fight. Now he sees why Draven did it. Because his real file, the one etched on his heart, that one is full of every war crime imaginable. Poisoning. Assassinations. Inciting riots. Killing… whoever needed to be silenced, for the good of the Rebellion.

“I understand they were war heroes,” a new voice says from inside the room. “But must we honor them? When there are countless fewer lives in the galaxy because of them?”

Fewer lives? Of course. There’s no Darth Vader, no Krennic, no Tarkin. But there’s no Tivek, no Tonc, no… he can’t even begin to name all those that had died in the war, can’t begin because that list is one with no ending.

“And there is no Alderaan, either,” someone snaps in return. Not Leia, no. But someone else he thinks he might have heard in some briefing room or another. Another former Rebel. “Nor a Jedha, nor…”

“Enough, enough.” A big, booming sort of voice, from someone who sounds far too jovial. “We can debate moral relativism another day. It’s simple. We’ll take it to the full Senate for a vote. If it passes, the memorial statue will be built.”

“Garden.”

At the sound of that voice, Cassian lets out a small sigh. He blinks, baffled. Baffled that he cares that it’s Leia who’s speaking, baffled that he repeats the word garden, as if he’s learning it for the first time.

“I’m sorry, Senator Organa, what did you say?”

“A garden.”

As if his own private repetition wasn’t enough. Now all he can see is a flash of a greenhouse with frosted over panes, feels the mud in his hands as his mother teaches him to plant seeds, remembers watching, waiting, waiting, for something green to sprout.

“I’d like it to be a garden, full of fruits and vegetables. And it should be in the refugee sector of Coruscant.” Leia speaks in that same polished way as the other Core-dweller had, but her voice carries nothing but warmth. “I think there’s a way to honor their work and to move ahead. Together.”

“It’ll be trampled. They’ll set up tents in there. Make a mess of it.”

“How lucky for you, then, Senator Jaim.” Leia replies. “You, who didn’t want a monument to them in the first place will surely be thrilled when it is turned into sleeping quarters for the homeless.”

Despite himself, Cassian smiles. Again, only for a second. This one the colder, sharper smile of a soldier enjoying a bout between two fighters. Enjoying, moreso, Leia winning. If his work had been diplomacy written in blood, Leia’s is written in wordplay that binds like durasteel traps.

 _A way to honor_. Cassian finds himself thinking of that, too. Honors had been given to every fallen soldier, even, especially, the officers. Draven’s death had been marked by plenty of medals, words, merits. But had Cassian done anything to honor the legacy of a man who’d found an orphaned boy in bombed-out rubble?

Or did he need to, when that same man had made the boy into a spy? And then, an assassin? How did one honor a legacy so complex? Could it be as simple as Leia said? A way to move forward while remembering all the good that had come from one person’s actions? Forward, way from the past, from the battles, from the nightmares. Jyn had told Cassian he needed to leave the war behind, or he would be its final causality. He thinks, now, perhaps she was right.

The meeting wraps up.

From the sound of it, her visitors all leave via hovercar docked outside her massive window. He thinks, for a moment, about talking to Leia now. Asking her why he’s been re-assigned, what his commanding officer could possibly be thinking? She needs a polished, civilian guard, not some battered old soldier. She needs someone who can keep her safe without giving the hologossip channels something to talk about. She needs someone… better than him.

 

“Senator, a moment, please.” that rebel speaks. Not Mu’gu’ge, but someone else. Who… Cassian strains to hear the almost familiar voice, but can’t quite place it.

“Senator? Truly Lando, I thought we were better friends.” Leia laughs, all her polish melting into that friendly tone Cassian heard on countless bases. She’d never spoken to the troops as if she was anything more than them. Never, unless they needed her to be. Leia knew when she needed to be on a pedestal, when she needed to offer awards and bless troops with the will of the Force, but Cassian had always thought she’d much rather be in the pilot’s seat of her own X-Wing. Instead, she let herself be shaped into the figurehead the Rebellion had needed. Now, he sees she’s still a figurehead, a marker of all that has been lost, a meaningless token to be discussed by other senators, and underestimated again and again.

“Ahh, but it’s such a lovely title for you, my dear.”

Lando. That’s the voice. Lando Calrissian. General. Governor, and now, apparently, senator. Cassian rubs his chin, not sure what to think. Perhaps now isn’t the best time to talk to Leia at all. After all, he knows he will be back here at her door tomorrow morning to begin the work.

He wonders, for a moment, if when he arrives back here tomorrow, if it will be Lando greeting him at the door. Cassian’s stomach does a strange turn at the thought, one he wishes he could blame on the peppers or the stew he’d eaten. One he’s quite sure has nothing to do with indigestion and everything to do with emotions that he has no right to have.

Then, an even more familiar voice, far closer to him than whatever lies beyond that door, makes him nearly jump out of his skin.

“Cassian?” K-2S0 asks.

“Kaytu?” he hisses, turning around to find the droid next to him. “What are you doing here?”

“My job.”

“I didn’t need you to follow me.”

“You,” K-2S0 says, “are not my job though you are occasionally a good deal of work.”

“What… what’s your job?”

“I told you.”

“Protecting… no. You said a gambler. Not a… not a senator.”

“I did not say he was not a senator.” K-2SO counters, hands on hips. Cassian does notice the belt slung with two blasters and logs it as a _very bad idea_ not that anyone’s asked him. “You didn’t ask.”

“Is your bos Lando Calrissian?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you.” K-2S0 says. “Although congratulations on being a very good guesser.”

Cassian gives in to his bafflement and raps Kay’s chassis gently. “Alright old friend. Have it your way. Enjoy work. Get home safely, yeah?”

“Home?”

“Our apartment.”

“You have never called it home before. You have lived there for three years.”

“Trying out a new word, I guess.” Cassian’s hands go into his pockets. “I’ll see you when you get back.” He considers asking Kay to pass along a message but worries it won’t get passed in a way that will… help things. He’ll just talk to Leia tomorrow.

Tomorrow. That word, like home, he finds has started to feel different in his mind. Brighter, crisper. Better.

 

Draven had said one more thing to Cassian, once. Once, when he’d been a boy, and frustrated with his failures, with his inability to climb as fast, run as far, as the other recruits. Once, when he’d only known an intelligence operative as someone who works hard at their task, and not someone who might have to do the things no one else wishes to do. _If today sucks, ask yourself. What are you going to do to make tomorrow better? The past is dead. Tomorrow’s still alive. As long as you are, and longer yet. So. What are you going to do about it?_

For the first time in years, Cassian doesn’t fear the dawn. He goes to bed without a drink, without a shudder of anxiety. Instead, he falls asleep thinking of that meal, of the way the smile spread over tired but free faces, of Leia’s words. Of a garden, of a kitchen, and a home.

He dreams, for the first time in years, of peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to amazing betas and friends who cheer me on. Comments welcome!


	3. Sleepy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassian shows up for his first day on the job. It doesn't go so well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: this chapter contains canon-typical violence, however, it is in the scenario of an active-shooter in a public location. I completely understand if you want to skip the chapter (and it was, honestly, incredibly hard for me to write)  
> The scene begins after the line “I know, it’s a novel concept but…” and ends with "maybe that’s all peace time can be."  
> There won't be many more (if any) canon-typical violence, but I wanted to make it very clear :) The next chapter can be read without this one, if you'd like.

Leia is awoken far too early by a knocking at her door. “Wha….” she rubs her eyes. There’s been no alert, which means its one of the people the door has been coded to allow within five feet of the door. Which means it has to be Lando, Amilyn, or… Cassian? It wouldn’t be the other two, not with how late senatorial work had gone last night.

She hits a button on her bedside table for her door, letting it slide open, as she slips out of her bed, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders. It drags behind her the way a royal cloak might, back when she wore such things. Now, her outfits have less to do with tradition, and more with protection. Every dress she owns is loose enough not to bother her, and voluminous enough to hide the body armor and weapons she carries everywhere.

It is Cassian at her door. His hair is more neatly brushed, and his beard seems a little more crisp than she remembered. His uniform, too, is far less rumbled. Everything about him is a little sharper now, a little more in focus.

Her heart soars, or at least, flops around in a slightly more positive manner than it usually does these days. If she had more caffeine in her system, or more than a few hours of sleep, maybe her heart might do something closer to an energetic hop at seeing this newer Cassian, this man with purpose in his eyes once more.

“You’re early,” Leia mumbles, each word far too much work this early in the day. Is it even day? It doesn’t feel like a day. Coruscant's entire solar schedule is artificial after all (something Leia has heard Amilyn rant a great deal about lately) so can’t Leia be her own personal judge of what’s too early to be considered morning?

“Your day begins at 0500,” Cassian says.

“I… how… she rubs her eyes. “Where did you hear that?”

“From your official document.”

“My what?”

“The documents. For guard work.”

“Cassian,” Leia braces herself on her door. She’d much rather place a warm, comforting hand on his shoulder but she still remembers how he’d jumped the last time. “Can I make caf? Now? Before… words.”

He nods. Leia decides that’s a good enough answer and turns, heading toward her kitchenette.

“May I come in?”

“Oh. Yeah. Of course.”

As the soft bootsteps follow her, Leia frowns, and not just at how long the water takes to boil. This hadn't been what she’d expected, what she’d hoped for. All she’d wanted was… well. What she always wants. Peace. Happiness. Not for her, no, that’s something long gone from her life, but for him. Cassian is acting like she requested him to be an official guard (which, technically, she did) but she’d thought he’d know enough to read between the lines. To take the offered rest implicit in his new contract. Or at least she’d thought it had been implicit. She’d thought he’d see her name, know that she could protect herself. That she didn’t need a bodyguard any more than he needed to keep fighting.

“Caf?” she asks.

“No, thank you.”

“Tea? Water?”

“No, thank you.”

Right. That’s a _lovely_ start to this working relationship. He’s busy tapping away on his datapad, looking like he wishes he could be anywhere, even tucked back into that sniper spot, instead of here.

Leia finishes making her caf just as he asks, “do you still meet Senator Calrissian for caf at 0700?”

“Uh.”

“Should I read off your entire schedule? We can update it if there’s been changes.” Cassian’s brow furrows. “Maybe we should check over all of the documents if they’re this outdated.”

"We don't have to follow the documents," Leia says, settling on the couch with her mug. Cassian, he notice, is the opposite of setted. He stands next to her, arms behind his back, shoulders level. It reminds her uncomfortably of all the briefings she's given over the years. She doesn't want that. Not in her apartment. Not in this new life she's trying to carve out for herself, chip away a small piece of the new hopeful world she helped win. Sometimes she imagines her hope exactly like that. A tiny shard of something incredibly fragile. Something with sharp edges that can cut if she holds it too close,. "I would prefer to follow standard procedures." "I see." There's nothing standard about this,, doesn't he understand? A war hero like him shouldn't be playing at bodyguard any more than he should still be suffering for the peace he'd fought for his whole life. If Leia only deserved a shard of peace, Cassian deserved a whole gemstone of it. Valuable, polished, treasured. All of the troops did. All of the brave fighters she hadn't been able to give medals to, the innocents who died when commanders like Leia made the wrong judgement call. Luke had mentioned he'd given one of the fragments of the Jedi’s Great Tree to Shara Bey. Given a priceless relic to someone who, at least according to the history books, barely deserved a mention. Shara, Kes, Biggs… so many names, so many faces, and yet, there could only be so many heroes. Hadn’t she explained that to Han himself, when he’d fought the idea of receiving a medal back on Yavin IV? She’s sure she said something at least half-way wise, although certainly heavily plagiarized from all the lectures her father had given her over the years. About how important it was for a movement to have a figurehead, a symbol of hope. About how one must allow themself to shine, in order for others to see their way in the dark.

It must have been a good speech, if it had gotten Han to accept the medal on behalf of every brave fighter that couldn’t. Leia wishes she could remember it, or remember much at all of the time before Hoth. Things became fuzzy, quickly, in her past. The destruction of Alderaan a last, clear, horrible memory, etched in her mind with bright green light and screams of a million voices, and then… nothing. Snowy static coats every memory between then and the night Luke went missing on Hoth.

Leia wonders if her brother feels the same way she does. About medals. About heroes. That for the standard bears of the Rebellion like the two of them, peace came with rewards. Opportunities. But what opportunities did others have, when they'd spent a lifetime fighting battles that won them no galactic honor, honed skills unnecessary, or worse, illegal in peace time?

“Cassian, I didn't ask for you to be moved to this role to be a model of military perfection.”

“Pardon?”

His words are polite, but his grip on the datapad is tight enough his knuckles go pale.

“I… I asked for you to be my guard. To give you back a little peace.”

“I was ordered to take this role. By my commanding officer.”

“Yes, and I put in the paperwork.”

Cassian looks at her then, suddenly, and sharply, and his gaze hurts worse than any words. There’s real pain in his eyes, clearer than she’d ever seen. It melts into fury as she watches, the smallest bit of a frustrated snarl appearing on his face. “How dare you.”

“I…”

“I am not your pawn.’

“I never said you were.” Leia tries to keep her voice calm. “I… Fine. I’m sorry. I’ll rescind my paperwork.”

“I’m here now. I will do my duty.” And just like that, the rage folds itself away. He’s once again polite, calm, cold. Everything she’d always thought of him as during the war. “We will follow your schedule.”

“I…”

“I will meet you in the dining hall for your morning caf with the other Senators.”

And just like that, Cassian sweeps back out of her apartment. The room is somehow so much colder without him there. Leia thinks back to Hoth, and this time, all she can think of is giving the order to close the doors, knowing that she was trapping Luke and Han out there in the ice. Sacrificing the ones she loved for the cause that was her life. Always, always choosing the cause over the people, until the day she lost Han, and decided some things were worth risking everything for.

 

* * *

 

Leia paces. Back and forth over the small bit of clear space in her apartment, her long coat whipping around her ankles at every turn. The day had passed as most days did, even after that terrible start. Cassian became her shadow, tailing her on her routine, which, admittedly, did follow a schedule, beyond her slow start to her morning. He hadn’t spoken to her, except when necessary. That same icy tension followed them all week but Leia still considers it a success. After all, him glaring at her is better than glaring down the view of a sniper’s scope.

Today, though, she’d told him to take a lunch elsewhere, that she needed to change. When really, she just wanted to talk to someone who might understand. But to talk about a thing is to acknowledge that it’s real, and worse, that she failed to fix it on her own.

FInally, she gives in. Turns to her holoprojector. Presses the combination of codes to patch in, connecting directly to a droid.

There’s a friendly, familiar beep. “Hello, dear friend,” she says softly, and is answered by a long whistle, before Artoo starts to chatter, filling her in on all she’s missed.

“I am quite happy here,” Leia lies. “And very glad that things are going well at the camp. It sounds like Bodhi is spoiling you and Threepio.”

A few more chirps.

Leia laughs. “Good. You deserve all that extra attention. Tell Bodhi thank you for me.”

They chat a little while later. Her binary is rusty, after so long away, but Artoo’s always been good about trying multiple ways to tell the same story.

And then, she hears him, his voice as warm and sweet as ever. Her brother, the only family she had left, the family she’d found after losing everyone else. “Leia! Hey, I wasn’t expecting a call from you.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No, no. It’s the usual chaos around here.” Luke’s smile is clear in his voice. The Jedi school, after all, also functions as an orphanage for children of the war, which means there’s always plenty of little ones scampering around.

“I was actually wondering if Bodhi might be around.”

“Bo? I think so, yeah. He’s out working with-- I mean. Working on a ship. That needs repairs, yeah?”

Leia doesn’t need to tap into the all-powerful Force to feel the awkwardness exuding from her brother. There’s something he’s not telling her, something…

Something answered with the soft thud of old boots, scuffing over the floor, echoing in Artoo’s audio system. “Hey there, your majesticness.” There’s a voice as familiar as dawn, as wild as hyperspace, as terrifying as falling, and her hand goes to her heart. The racing pulse tells her all she needs to know, all she needs to hide. She swallows. Steels herself. It’s just two words. She can say two words. Then, she'll… keep saying words. String things together into sentences that mean nothing.

“Hi Han.”

There’s a sudden, sharp knocking on Leia’s door.

“Oh!”

“Something wrong?” Han asks, with that same focused care he always gave her when she was in danger. Never when she wasn’t, though. They were most in love when they were most at risk.

“I… uh.” The senator famous for her speeches can find nothing, nothing at all to say. The Falcon, (because of course that was the ship that Luke couldn't name) is not the only thing that needs repairs.

“Leia, let’s go!”

It’s a man’s voice. It’s… It’s Cassian’s voice, but he’s speaking to her like a friend and not like a guard and she’s never been more selfishly grateful in her life.

“Somebody wants to--” Han begins.

“Yes, yes. Must go, bye!” Leia clicks off the communication, just as the door opens.

Cassian tilts his head, but says nothing.

“You…” Leia begins, finding these words almost as hard to string together. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

She blushes, but forges on. “Cause a distraction.” Call her by her name. Give her an escape. There’s so many multi-faceted little things to be thankful for, all from one tiny sentence of his.

Cassian shrugs. “Sounds like you needed one.”

Leia smiles at him. For once, he smiles back at her. The expression lasts for only a moment, but their day is easier after that. Cassian’s silence feels a little warmer, his nods are a degree less curt. Maybe, just maybe, this hadn’t been the worst idea after all. Maybe it’s in saving each other that they can save themselves.

The days pass. She’d gotten a message that two other guards had been assigned to her detail for trips and excursions, but that Cassian could not be switched away from protecting her, not this month. So, they’re trapped in a mundane, silent dance, her always leading, him following her. The light fades from Cassian’s eyes, the friendly warmth she’d seen for that moment nothing but a mirage on the horizon. She’d failed. Cassian is in no better a place here, serving as her guard, than he’d been when she saw him on that balcony.

That had been her hope. To save him now, from that life she couldn’t have asked him to leave during the Rebellion. Leia had seen every filed operative’s files, knew that Cassian had sustained a great deal of damage, both physical, and emotional, in the war, and yet, still had to send him out on missions.

She’d had to send so many good people out on missions, and so few ever came back.

* * *

 

As time passes, the ice between them only growing colder. Each morning, Cassian is there precisely on-time, and Leia is never ready on time. Even when she tries to be, there’s always one more message to send, or a bit of her outfit that needs further adjusting, or…

“You could move your start time up,” he finally says, one morning, while she hurries to rub some under-eye cream over the dark circles that have been there since the day she’d joined the Rebellion. Even now, when she has the luxury of time enough to sleep, she can’t seem to fall asleep at all. She’s spent countless nights pacing in front of her window, watching documentary holos on various cultures, reading messages and old senatorial resolutions.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because.” Because she’s stubborn. Because she’s trying to be better. Because she wants to be as reliable to him as he is to her.

“That’s the answer I give my friend’s kid when I watch him and he wants to pilot the U-Wing.”

“That wouldn’t be Shara Bey’s son, would it?”

She’s rewarded with one of those rare, rare smiles he has. The one with no pain, no bitterness, no self-mockery. “You’ve met Poe, yeah?”

“I have. The same day he climbed Threepio, actually.”

The smile remains, and Leia thinks its her finest victory all week. Better than any signature on any resolution, better than any sparring match. “You have good taste in friends then, Senator.”

“Leia.”

“Senator.”

She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose, which somehow smears her mascara enough for her to start all over again. Or at least, she should. Suddenly, she’s quite sick of makeup, of performative costuming to conjure the image she’s supposed to have, of everything that keeps her trapped in the role of Senator. She’d hated that same cage offered by the title _Princess,_ but hadn’t minded it so much, not when Han and Luke and all her other friends ignored the title to befriend the woman who bore it. Cassian, however, seems incapable of doing the same. “You know what? Clear my calendar.”

“Pardon?”

“Change of plans for today. I’m going to the Memorial Park.” She wipes off the rest of her ruined makeup with a cloth. Her dress is perhaps a little too formal for a trip outside the senatorial complex, but with a jacket thrown over her bare shoulders, no one will notice. A jacket… but not his.

She’d been so silly to wear his jacket around her room before, to pretend to feel safe with its comfortable weight heavy on her shoulders. They had just been ships passing each other along a hyperspace route, nothing more than that. Whatever closeness she’d felt with him had been imagined. Hoped for. Dreamed about. But not true. Not at all.

And she hadn’t been able to help him, in the end. As always, fixing a person proved to be much harder than winning a battle or fixing a government. Because people, unlike battalions, have emotions. They’re not pieces on a Dejarik board, capable of being moved by her, commanded by her, fixed by her. Breha had told her that she’d never be able to settle down, if she didn’t learn to compromise. She’d thought her mother foolish then. She hadn’t realized how right she was, nor how much she would crave to talk to Breha again.

Leia stews on the matter throughout their walk to the park. The location is one that’s new, built sometime after Leia left behind Coruscant, left behind diplomacy for combat… and never thought she’d return. There’s a row of solar-powered, auto-recycling fountains that flicker with pleasing shades of purple, rows of floral trees, and a small vendor cart in the corner, offering shaved ices.It’s a perfect place to have this talk, she thinks. Open-air, free from the most overbearing of senators… or so she’d thought. Because there, near the lighted fountains, is Lando, speaking softly to his retinue. His purple cape and dramatic hand gestures give him away more than any elaborate hairstyle ever revealed Leia’s identity. Then again, Lando has nothing to hide.

As much as she’s watching Lando, Cassian is watching K-2SO. Wordlessly, she turns to him, nods, and they both leave the park behind. Neither of them ready to encounter that ensemble of friends, not right now.

Which means, perhaps, Cassian senses what’s coming too.

They end up sitting inside a small restaurant a little ways away from the park. There’s a counter with a single droid who is operating as both cashier and cook, and a mostly-empty dining area. Leia orders a meal, though she pays no attention while she does so, focusing only on the fact that it’s finger food, all the better to pick apart into pieces. She orders a drink for Cassian, though she knows he won’t touch it.

He takes the drink with a raised eyebrow and leads them to an empty table in the corner, far from the exit door on the other side of the room. “I could have purchased it myself.”

“You’re my guard. You’re on my payroll.”

“Technically, I’m on the government's payroll.”

“Well, it saves me an expense report then.”

“As long as it’s to make your life easier,” he says with that easy sarcasm, the type that Leia’s never quite sure if it’s mocking him or her or just the universe at large.

“And not yours?”

She speaks clearly, with all the poise she uses on the Senate floor. Not ready to let him duck away from this one. Not ready to let him go.

His lips press together and for once, it’s him who looks away first. “No.”

“Cassian, I…” Leia picks at her food, wishing for a moment she knew what she’d ordered, if only so her brain could think about something, anything, other than this moment. “This isn’t working.”

“Oh?”

“You can’t tell me this is enjoyable for you either,” Leia responds.

“My job is seldom enjoyable.”

“Neither is mine,” Leia comments, “although working with you had the potential to be the one enjoyable thing about it.”

“Leia…” he sighs her name and suddenly he’s that man who made her soup again, the one who told her all about the uprising at Kuat, the one who let himself be knocked unconscious so the droids could write their charter. The good man, and more importantly, the genuine one.

“I asked for you to be taken off monitoring duty,” such a clean word for such a dirty task, “and assigned to guard work for your own mental health, yes. But--” she holds up a hand, before he can give one of his own lectures, if only because she’s sure she’s heard this one before. “I asked you to be my guard because I wanted a friend.”

“A friend.”

“I know, it’s a novel concept but…”

“No, I just--”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he _moves._ One hand flies forward, pushing Leia down, even as he’s leaping to his feet to stand between her and-- and what?

A second later, the second blaster bolt hits the floor near her. Clarity slams into Leia. For the first time in years, she’s under attack. There’s screams from the few other people in the restaurant, a scattering of gasps and curses and feet racing to escape the room. Leia opens her mouth to shout to them, to warn them, to--

“Down,” Cassian says, pushing her shoulder. “Under the table.” With his free hand, he draws his blaster, aiming as he lifts it. Fires twice, the zing of the bolt as burned into Leia’s memory as ever.

She’s mostly under the table now, but she can’t stop trying to peer around them. Wondering what the threat is. Cassian fires once more.

The room is silent. But there’s no screams of pain, from either the civilians or whoever the attacker had been. Leia keeps searching the room, hating how little she can see, even as she knows she’s safer here, that Cassian is taking on the risk on himself alone, like a fool.

Cassian brings his wrist comm closer to his mouth. “Kay. Active shooter situation. Perimeter check?”There’s no answer.

Boots thud near them, and Cassian swings his gun in that direction. Leia’s gaze tracks, to see an unfamiliar man with a beard and a uniform similar to Cassian’s own. “Easy, Captain!”

“Melshi?” there’s real shock in Cassian’s voice. Shock, followed by something almost like… a smile.

“Yeah, on your six.”

“Now?”

“Well, since you started the gig, but…” He flashes a brilliant smile, before tapping buttons into his comm unit. “No casualties outside,” he says. Leia lets out a small sigh of relief. Then, Melshi races toward the far tables, barking evacuation orders. As he does, Leia catches movement, high above them. She springs out from under the table, raies her gun…

It’s a droid, she realizes, even as she squeezes the trigger. Cassian realizes a split second too late, moves for cover… just as Leia’s shot is a direct hit, smashing into the droid and leaving it nothing more than a tangle of burned circuits. There’s a flash of amazement in Cassian’s eyes, but he says nothing.

The two square off, back to back, both of them holding blasters at the ready, waiting for the next attack. “Droids,” she says.

He makes a curt exhale for his only agreement. “You should get to cover.”

“Not without you.” Leia keeps her blaster trained, waiting, watching. Was this an assassination attempt? The shots had seemed directed at only her… Force, she’d been an idiot, bringing the both of them into the public. Away from the safety of the Senate building. She’d wanted to be normal, wanted to speak to him as a friend, a peer, and now… Now he’s more her bodyguard than he’s ever been before.

And innocent people had been put in danger by her rash choice. Force, she’s an idiot.

Cassian hits his comm once more.“Kay!”

**On it. Shouting is unnecessary.**

“Force damn it Kay…”

**Perimeter secure, suspect apprehended**

A zinging volley of blaster fire echoes, followed by a woman’s terse shout of, “All clear!”

“Rodma?” Cassian manages to sound both baffled and stressed, which is the sort of emotional range that would be shocking from anyone else.

A guard leaps down from the balcony above. Her blond hair is pulled back, and she has a rifle slung over her shoulder. “Five assassination droids. We’ve got ‘em all, and the team outside’s got the guy with the remote for them.”

“Good.” Even if he’s shocked to see her, whoever she is, Cassian already has suppressed those emotions. There’s nothing but professional coolness in his voice now. It’s such a _shock_ to Leia, and for the first time, she misses Han in this sort of a situation. Misses his witty one-liners (which admittedly, only had about a 30% chance of even making sense), misses his chaotic way of somehow keeping everyone safe while managing to destroy far more personal property than anyone else might, misses his _shouting._

Han didn’t just have emotions. Han Solo is a bundle of emotions, wrapped up with a scrap of stubborn twine and tucked into the old smuggler’s clothes he wears like protection against becoming anything else. His emotions, though, can’t be contained, and when Leia hadn’t been able to feel anything, when she’d stared into the face of her rescue with cold nonchalance, Han’s drama had been _annoying_ enough to provoke a response. She’d never told him, not even in one of their admittedly rare quiet moments together, that her exasperation at him had been the first true feeling, the first tangible thing, she remembered after Alderaan’s destruction.

Cassian is speaking quietly to Melshi and Rodma and while leia watches, realization finally strikes. First of their names on old Rebellion crew lists. Both of them had been in the fight since before Yavin, before the Death Star had even been whispered of. Someday, Leia thinks, she’d like to know more of what it had been like in those early days. What Cassian had to face, what he’d struggled with.

But that would require him to be her friend, which is clearly not what he wants. He hasn’t even checked on her. Han would have made such a fuss over her by now, scooped her up, insisted on taking her to the medbay. And the fuss had been nice… sometimes. Usually, though, it made her feel like she'd been an ice sculpture to him, one that he desperately wanted to melt back into the hot-blooded warrior-princess he liked her best as.

Finally, Cassian turns and stalks toward Leia. His hand goes to her shoulder, his eyes searching hers. Leia swallows, trying not to blush at the intensity. She thinks back to the fight, back to how Cassian focused as much on her as he had on the targets. Is that why he didn’t need to ask? Because she’d never left his perception. He’d know instantly if she had been hurt. Cassian’s voice is a low, sharp whisper when he finally speaks. “I told you to _stay_ hidden.”

“And I covered your back.”

“I was trying to protect you!”

Leia doesn’t blink. Doesn’t do anything at all, except to say, “yes. And I’ve been doing the same for you, though you seem intent on dragging yourself away from any cover offered.”

She storms out of the restaurant. She’s furious enough that the next few hours unfold with that same fuzzy haze she’d felt before. Questions are asked, suspects interrogated. Reports are filed. No one was hurt, which was the one thing that registered faintly in her mind. For once, no one is hurt, no greater battle awaits them, and maybe that’s all peace time can be.

* * *

 

It’s Rodma who walks Leia back to her room. The woman explains with the barest details, that Melshi and she agreed to follow Cassian on any assignment they could. “We’re all spec ops troops, more or less. Funny how today would have been a pretty tame day, all things considered, during the war.”

“A lot of things were different then,” Leia agrees. “He seemed surprised you were there.” She decides not to add that she too had been surprised, since she’d deleted the message about her newly appointed guards without reading either of their bios.

“Yeah, we lost contact. I couldn’t cover his sniper work, see?” she taps her cheek, below the eyepatch, and near a long, corded scar. “Lost it on Scarif.”

“Thank you for your service,” Leia says, automatically.

“And thank you,” she replies. “For getting him out of there.”

“Even if he hates me for it?”

She shrugs. “I mean, no one likes bein’ bossed around. You can’t fix a person like you can slice a datapad. Gotta let them fix themselves, once you give them the tools.”

Leia nods, taking in that knowledge, her own wrong-doing a little more clear. “I’m glad you were there today. All of you.”

“So are we.”

Rodma waits at Leia’s door, but doesn’t ask to go in. When Leia invites her, she shakes her head. "My spouse and I have plans. I promised them a picnic by the canyon."

"That sounds nice."

"It won't be half-bad," Rodma agrees in what Leia is rapidly realizing is her true personality, droll but charming in its dryness. "You get some rest, all right? Four hours a night ain't enough for any humanoid out of stasis."

"How did you..."

"We've all seen your schedule, Senator. It's a little terrifying."

There's something oddly amusing about a former special forces soldier being  _afraid_ of Leia's schedule, and she smiles. "I'll try."

"Do better than try."

Leia just laughs and waves to the woman, who salutes, then walks away.

* * *

 

When Leia opens her door, she braces herself for the starkness of an empty room. She's been dreading it, knowing that her brain will decide the silence offered by the place she should call home is the exact moment she should relieve today's shooting. Hopefully the queued holodocumentaries will keep her thoughts away. Hopefully, there's something semi-edible left in her kitchen. Hopefully...

There's someone in her apartment. Because it smells like food, like warmth, like life. There's lights on, and music softly playing, though that stops the moment she walks in. Leia is shocked to see Cassian, there, at her table, waiting. There’s food spread out too, some sort of shredded meat and flatbread and vegetables, and… “What…”

“You missed both meals on your schedule,” he replies, setting out a plate for each of them as she comes to sit down. “You truly are terrible at following it.”

“I’m a little stubborn.”

“So I am rapidly finding out,” he murmurs. Finally, finally, it’s that warm voice from the first night. The one that offers friendship, and the one that Leia is so grateful to accept.

“But I can admit when I am wrong.”

“Wonders never cease.” He picks up a bottle of wine. "I noticed this on your counter.

"It's from Lando."

"Is that good or bad?"

"That's expensive, is what that is." But Leia nods. Maybe they both need a glass. An excuse, an admittedly unhealthy use of the beverage, but one that they could both use. For her apology and his... whatever he's feeling. That doesn't matter. She knows what she needs to say. She know she has to do better than try. "I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have made you my guard.”

“No,” he agrees, filling their glasses.  “I should have volunteered.”

Leia stops, the filled flatbread an inch from her mouth. “What?”

“You clearly need a guard. I’m staying on. And tomorrow, we are re-vamping your schedule, entirely.” Cassian folds his arms, rocks back just a little in his chair. “If you want me to be safe, Leia, you’re going to have to let me ensure your safety too.”

“Fine,” she manages, before she takes a bite. The food is incredible, a blend of heat and spice and so many things she can’t name that she’s been missing for so long. “As friends.”

Cassian’s voice is as gentle as melting ice when he echoes her. “Fine.” There's a long pause, long enough for Leia to wonder if maybe she's misjudged the situation. Maybe it's too much for him. Maybe she's still pushing too much. But then, after he sips his wine, he agrees,  “as friends.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments welcome!  
> NEXT CHAPTER:  
>  _Cassian watches the small furry being approach him. The Ewok's humming is supposedly soothing, according to Threepio, but Cassian can't help but find the song menacing, given the item clutched in furry paws. "Oh no," Cassian says. "I am absolutely not wearing that._  
>  Our couple heads to Endor!


End file.
